Sunday 7 February 2010 19.05 EST
First published on Sunday 7 February 2010 19.05 EST

There should be an age after which TV presenters don't have to climb ropes. Sixty-five, I'd suggest. ­Because at 71, David Dimbleby is looking as if he'd much rather have his feet firmly on the ground. He's hanging 40ft above the stone floor of the Holy Trinity Church in Coventry, in Seven Ages of Britain (BBC1, Sunday), looking at a ­terrifying medieval painting of The Last Judgment. He goes up very ­gingerly, and when he swings round so he's facing the wrong way, he kicks out into space with his legs to try to come round again. Very undignified. And interesting socks: red and orange stripes.

Ah, that's better, now he's back on earth, and making stained glass with some ladies in Canterbury. This is much more appropriate. Thankfully he's not, as they once did, using urine to mix the colour, but vinegar instead. For reasons of taste and hygiene, I ­imagine, and also because apparently the best urine for staining glass is that of a pre-pubescent red-haired boy, and there isn't one of those to hand. The Christ child, as depicted in Richard II's beautiful altar piece at the National Gallery, would have done. Who knew it, the son of God a ginger?

Dimbleby is very good at this: ­romping through the art of the middle ages, tying it all together with what was going on in the church and on the throne at the time. He pitches it just right, neither too scholarly nor too populist. And thank heaven there's no reconstruction, apart from Dimbleby's own DIY ones. In Canterbury cathedral, he swings his imaginary sword at an imaginary Thomas a Becket, smashing open his skull and letting his brains run out of the floor. At 'im, David!

Where he's less good is when it comes to meeting real, living people, members of the public. Such as lovely old couple Burt and Margaret in the Northamptonshire village of ­Geddington, where there's a stone monument to Edward I's wife, Eleanor of Castile. Does Burt see Margaret as pure and chaste as the Virgin Mary and as Eleanor, David wants to know. "Yes, I'm sure he does," says Margaret. "Definitely," agrees Burt. "Yes, yes, we've never sort of had any flings or anything of that sort."

Does Burt put Margaret on a ­pedestal? Stop it, David; it's getting embarrassing. Leave them alone. Do you put your wife on a pedestal? In your red and orange stripey socks, maybe?

Ann Widdecombe, a sprightly spring chicken at 62, might not be able to climb a rope, but, in The Bible: A History (Channel 4), she makes it to the top of Mount Sinai, also in search of answers to questions of an ecliastical nature. Well, Moses made it, and he was probably in his 80s, so she's jolly well going to get up there, too. It's where he received the Ten Commandmants from God of course, a meeting that has formed the moral framework of Ann's life – and of many others' lives, as well as changing world history, forming the foundations of a lot of ­legal systems, etc.

It looks hard work being Ann ­Widdecombe, and not just because she's huffing and puffing up Mount ­Sinai. She's so cross about so many things – secularism, scepticism, the ­scientists who question whether there ever was an exodus of Israelites from Egypt (where's the archeological ­evidence?), the modern world, the lack of respect for elders, the end of morality, the breakdown of families and of society, teenage pregnancies, Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry, who are less enthusiastic about the commandments, and who she has run-ins with. It looks lonely being her as well, like she feels it's just her standing up for God's law as told to Moses, calling for a return to puritanism. There's something quite tragic about it. Oh Ann, you were born about 3,000 years after you should have been.

They're not big on the Ten ­Commandments in the border town of Tijuana, as portrayed in This World: Mexico's Drug War (BBC2, Sunday), a proper piece of reporting by Katya Adler. They're not big on any of them, but especially not the one about not killing. Bodies pile up in the street, some are dissolved in barrels of acid, others simply disappear. It's not unlike that painting of the last judgment high up in the Holy Trinity Church in Coventry. Terrifying.